My Spiritual Odyssey: I had lots of questions about religion when I was in high school. I wanted to know how the universe got created. How could an infinite spiritual being, who obviously had no "substance" before there was any substance, make something out of nothing? Would there be anything interesting to do in Heaven? What exactly is a person's soul? I wanted to know!

          I figured that the only real answers lay in the realm of the physical sciences. I was always good at math and science, so I studied Engineering Physics at Cornell University. I learned a lot about math and physics, got an introduction to all the engineering disciplines and even had time to take several electives in the humanities. Somewhere along the line I picked up the idea that you could never learn anything about God or the spiritual world by studying the physical universe which was, after all, only a finite creation of an infinite being.

          I was never quite comfortable with just taking things on faith and believing something just because God supposedly told us that that's the way it is. So, I became an Agnostic and put God on the shelf for further analysis at some future time.

          My last year ar Cornell, I took a course called "Brain Models and Mechanisms." I learned a lot about the human brain and studied the efforts that were being made at that time to make a computer model of the brain. After I got an introduction to computer programming in graduate school and actually began to work in the field, I discovered a book called "Computers and Thought" that extolled the virtues of a new field called "Artificial Intelligence."

          I was hooked and proceeded to spend another five years in graduate school studying computer science and doing research in Artificial Intelligence. By this time I had bought into the premise that human thought could eventually be simulated by a big enough, fast enough computer. Boy was I wrong!

          The final stage of my enlightenment started with my discovery and reading of Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard. I discovered through Dianetics and Scientology how the mind really works. I learned that the human mind is not simply the end result of brain evolution; it is something else entirely and it merely uses the brain with its various control circuits to communicate with and get the body to do what it wants it to.

          I was thrilled to find that the answers to all my questions about life and its relationship to the physical universe had already been addressed and resolved through the research efforts of Mr. Hubbard. The answers are readily available to anyone and everyone who cares to follow the path of discovery that has been laid out for us in Scientology. That's why I'm a Scientologist. It's where I found all the answers!